Kazuya Nakai

Kazuya Nakai, born in Kobe in 1967, has been voicing Roronoa Zoro since One Piece began in 1999, and that single role has outlasted most acting careers outright. It runs through the television series and through more than a dozen films, from the first feature in 2000 to One Piece Film Red. Play any two of them twenty years apart and the voice is the same instrument: low, dry, a growl that sits at the back of the throat and only rises when the character has decided something.

The useful comparison is Mugen in Samurai Champloo, because it shows how much variation lives inside that narrow band. Zoro is disciplined; Mugen is all improvisation and bad manners, and Nakai plays the difference in rhythm rather than in pitch, chopping the line readings up so the character sounds like he is fighting the sentence. Toshiro Hijikata in Gintama is the third setting, deadpan and permanently irritated, which is where his comic timing shows.

He works constantly, and a large part of that is the supporting register: Mogi in Death Note, Miles in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Jan Valentine in Hellsing, Domeki in xxxHOLiC, Ryuji Suguro in Blue Exorcist, Akitaru Obi in Fire Force, Laplace in That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Games are the other half of the job: Date Masamune in Sengoku Basara, Xiahou Dun and Dian Wei in the Dynasty Warriors series, Shinjiro Aragaki in Persona, Mondo Owada in Danganronpa, and Jin Sakai in the Japanese dub of Ghost of Tsushima. He is the voice a Japanese production reaches for when a man has to sound dangerous without sounding stupid.